First some good news. Then the bad. In each instance the focus is on
America's public schools. The good news is proof from right here in the
Metro that the right kind of school can counteract the negative effects
of widespread poverty and shattered family life in the Black community.
The bad news concerns the alarming loss of awareness among far too many
of our young Americans that there is an objective right and wrong.

The bearer of the good news is Katherine Kersten, columnist for The Star Tribune, whose perceptive
comments on social issues will hold their own, and then some, with the
views expressed by featured columnists in any of the major papers of
this country. Here is what she has to say.

A North Minneapolis school at Olson Memorial Highway and Humboldt
Avenue has demographics that
seem a sure predictor of our state's most intractable education problem. The student population there is
99 percent black and 91 percent poor, and about 70 percent of the
children come from single-parent families.

Such "racial isolation" is
widely considered a formula for defeat -- a hallmark of the
cavernous "achievement gap" that separates poor, minority students from
their more affluent white peers. In
recent decades, Minnesota has spent billions of dollars attempting to
narrow the gap but has little to show for it.

That's why the ACHIEVEMENTS of
the school I just described should be SHOUTED from the rooftops. In
this year's state math tests in grades three through eight, this school
OUTPERFORMED every Metro-area school district, including Edina and
Wayzata. Its students outperformed all state students in reading
proficiency (77 percent to 75 percent), and state white students in
math proficiency (82 percent to 65 percent).

This extraordinary school is
Harvest Preparatory School, a K-6 charter with five programs, including
Best Academy, a K-8 boys program.

Black males are among our
state's lowest-performing groups of students, but at Best Academy, 100
percent of eighth-grade boys scored proficient in reading. "Best
Academy has the highest proportion of African-American boys of any
institution in Minnesota," says founder and director Eric Mahmoud. "The
only institution that competes with us is the prison system."

How have Mahmoud and his team
worked this magic? Mahmoud is an electrical engineer by training.
"At the factory I used to run, if we had a failure rate of 0.5 percent,
we'd shut down the line until we figured out the problem," he says. "In our education system, we're failing
with 40, 50, 60 percent of our African-American children, but we keep
the system that turns out the SAME product, year after year."

Mahmoud's NEW educational system includes the following components:

• Top-notch instruction: Every
day, Harvest devotes 100-minute time blocks to reading and math.
In early grades, the school teaches phonics and math facts using "drill
and kill" methods that would drive most education professors shrieking
from the room. But the "automaticity" that results liberates students
for the challenges that await them -- from deciphering Emily Dickinson
poems in fifth grade to mastering algebra in eighth grade.

• A laser-like focus on data: Harvest
continually assesses students on a host of measures so it can implement
targeted interventions BEFORE
kids fail. Teachers are evaluated based on their students' learning gains.

• A calendar that gives
students THE TIME THEY NEED TO MASTER what they need to know: Harvest
is in session 200 days a year, from 8 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. The key
to academic success, says Mahmoud, is "great teaching, and more of it."

But Harvest Prep doesn't stop
with academic excellence. At its heart is a school culture that
instills MORAL character.

The process begins with what
Mahmoud calls "the power of the uniform" -- no saggy pants or
short skirts here. Middle-school boys, for example, wear red ties,
khaki slacks and blazers. A culture
of manners and civility permeates the building. Students are
addressed as "scholars," say "please" and "thank you," and greet
visitors politely. Weekly ceremonies
recognize children who achieve academic success through hard
work, who sacrifice to help struggling classmates, or who demonstrate
moral courage and truthfulness.

The obligation to "give back" is
constantly discussed. "We don't just want great test-takers and
smart children -- we
want children who do good things,"
says Mahmoud. He cites Mary McLeod Bethune, a 19th-century black
education reformer. A sign above the door of a school she founded read,
"Enter to learn; go forth to serve."

Today, lots of folks - including
school board members, superintendents and state officials -- insist we
can't narrow the achievement gap without boatloads of new money. Some
say that if poor, minority children are to learn, they must be bussed
far from home to sit next to kids whose skin color or income bracket is
different. Few talk much about teaching kids the vital importance of
hard work, self-discipline, rejecting victimhood and taking
responsibility for their own success.

At Harvest Prep, students know
better. Every morning, as the Best Academy boys shout their creed
together, they say these words:

"We are boys striving to become
great men. We are the best, because we work hard at it; we make no
excuses; we ensure that we are always prepared; we will uplift each
other; we are our brother's keeper.

"We will be honest in our words
and honorable in our actions. ... We will respect our parents and honor
our elders....

"We are the best, NOT because we
SAY it -- but because the best is what we DO!"
----------------------Katherine Kersten is a senior
fellow at the Center of the American Experiment. She may be reached at kakersten@gmail.com

*
*
*
* *

Ms. Kersten's essay offers a
welcome antidote to the despair that prevails among too many of those
who are properly alarmed by the abysmal levels of achievement to which
America's public schools have fallen in the critical areas of reading,
writing, science, and math, not to mention (for its civic importance)
history. The U.S. Department of
Education recently issued a report on the AVERAGE level of achievement
shown in those disciplines by last year's public high school graduates:
it was the LOWEST EVER RECORDED IN THE U.S.A. Given the
importance in today's economy of skill in those precise areas, this
bodes ill for America's competitiveness on the global scene. But more
worrisome still is the erosion of consensus on moral issues among so many of our
young Americans; to a significant degree this is the fruit of the cult of
"multicultural diversity" that for quite some time has been the new
gospel move or less officially held up for veneration in our public
schools (and in many a private school as well).

Dennis Prager, a respected
political analyst, speaks his mind on what is an increasingly apparent
and deeply disturbing generational divide.

*
*
*
* *

Why
Young Americans Can't Think Morally
Moral standards have been replaced by feelings.
Dennis Prager The Washington Times, National
Edition, September 26

Two weeks ago, David Brooks of
the New York Times wrote a
column on an
academic study concerning the nearly complete lack of a moral
vocabulary among most American young people.

Below are excerpts from Brooks's
summary of the study of Americans aged
18 to 23. (The study was led by "the eminent Notre Dame
sociologist
Christian Smith")

"Smith and company asked about the young people's moral lives, and the
results are depressing....

"When asked to describe a moral dilemma they
had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn't answer the
question or described problems that are not moral at all....

"Moral
thinking didn't enter the picture, even when considering things
like
drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner....

"The
default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is
that moral choices are just a matter
of individual taste....

"As one
put it, 'I mean, I guess what makes
something right is how I feel about
it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn't
speak on
behalf of anyone else as to what's right and wrong....

"Morality was
once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it's thought of as
something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart."

Ever since I
attended college, I have been convinced that "studies" either confirm
what common sense suggests or
they are mistaken.

I realized this when I
was presented study after study
"showing" that boys and girls were not
inherently different from one another, and they acted differently only
because of sexist upbringings.

This latest study cited by David
Brooks
confirms what conservatives have known for a generation:

Moral
standards have been replaced by FEELINGS.

Of course, those on the left
only believe this when a
writer at a major liberal newspaper cites an
"eminent sociologist."

What is disconcerting about Brooks'
piece is
that nowhere in what is an
important column does he mention the
REASON
for this disturbing trend: namely - SECULARISM.

The intellectual class
and the left still believe that secularism is an unalloyed blessing.
They are wrong.

Secularism is good for government.

But it is terrible
for society (though still preferable to bad religion) and for the
individual.

One key reason is what secularism does to moral standards. If moral
standards are not rooted in God, they do not objectively exist.

Good
and evil become no more real than "yummy" and "yucky." They are
simply
a matter of personal
preference. One of the foremost liberal
philosophers, Richard Rorty, an atheist, acknowledged that, for the
secular liberal, "There is no
answer to the question, 'Why not
be
cruel?'"

With- the death of Judeo-Christian God-based standards,
people have simply substituted feelings for those standards. Millions
of American young people have been raised by parents and schools with
"How do you feel about it?"
as the only guide to what they
ought to do.
The heart has replaced God and the Bible as a moral guide.

And now, as
Brooks points out, we see the results.

A vast number of American young
people do not even ask whether an action is right or wrong.

The
question would strike them as foreign.

Why?

Because the question
suggests that there is a right
and wrong outside of themselves. And
just as for them there is no God higher than themselves, there is no
morality higher than themselves, either.

Forty years ago, I began
writing and lecturing about this problem.

It was then that I began
asking students if they would save their dog or a stranger FIRST if
BOTH were drowning.

The majority always voted against the stranger
-
because, they explained, they loved their dog
and they didn't
love the
stranger.

They followed their feelings.

Without God and Judeo-Christian
religions, what else is there?
[Emphasis added].

----------------------

Dennis Prager is a nationally
syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. He may be contacted
through his website, http://www.dennisprager.com.